


heart on the floor

by owlvsdove



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 14:17:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3252860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlvsdove/pseuds/owlvsdove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The conversation they need to have, and what comes after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heart on the floor

 

“You’re a hero,” he’s saying. She can’t really feel it. There’s still a lot of distance. Not physically – physically he’s sitting right next to her. But in other ways.

They’ve been talking all night.

His thumb and forefinger hold her chin in place, like she might decide to move, like she possibly _could_ move, and he kisses her softly on the cheek. He’s not prescribing; he’s not changing the game. He’s following the steps to the dance she started a long time ago, in a similar place but with quite dissimilar feeling. He lets go.

He’s trying to show her that he understands what she did now, and she appreciates that. But. Even if he does understand, there will always be a scorch mark on their history.  They used to seem perfect. Now they’re clinging to each other but they can’t look into each other’s eyes.

That’s worse.

She wants him so bad. And it’s not definable. In all of human history, has anyone felt this particular combination of guilt and desire and terror and love and sorrow and worship before her?

No. She’s certain.

She peeks at him but he’s not looking. He’s staring at his hands because she hasn’t said anything, and that makes him nervous. She wants to eat his nervousness; she wants to pry it away from him and shred it to bits. She wants him, she wants him.

They’ve done enough of this dance. She doesn’t want a better one. There is no _better_. She just wants to change it. A lateral shift. She wants him.

 

 

 

 

_“I don’t want to make you upset,” he says. “I just need to know why you left.”_

_She feels like a child. She feels like a tiny little girl crying helplessly._

_“Because I was making you worse.” She disintegrates. The wind picks her up. “Because nothing I could do was helping you.”_

_He lets her cry for a long time._

 

 

 

 

“Say something.”

This is Fitz’s brave voice. Clipped, weak in the middle, but a demand. She could still knock him over with a breeze.

Her eyes are searching the floor. She’s gearing up to something. Usually she does this part out loud but somewhere along the road they decided to clasp their lips, to only make sounds with vibrations rather than words in the English language. The ballerina has stopped spinning in her jewelry box. Perfect form and endless consistency traded in for something heart-pounding. Now she wants both.

“Jem, please. Say something.”

She turns her head and kisses him soundly on the mouth.

 

 

 

 

_“I don’t care what you can and can’t do. Do you understand that?” This part is vital. He is sweet, thin bravado over ice-cold doubt. He always has been. She needs him to listen to her words, and process them in the order they were spoken, at face value, and in tandem with the emotion behind them._

_That’s a tall order for him. He defaults on a lack of self-worth._

_“I only care about who you are.”_

_“What if who I am now is defined by what I can do? What if it’s always been that way?” He’s speaking to the carpet, but he’s peeking up at her._

_“You’re the one who decides that, Fitz. It doesn’t matter to me.”_

_“It matters to me.”_

_Why does he have to be so stubborn?_

_Okay. “Okay,” she says. “But it doesn’t matter to me. How you feel about yourself doesn’t change how I feel about you.”_

_He doesn’t say a word. There’s a very obvious question left on the precipice here._

_But he doesn’t say a word._

 

 

 

 

She pulls away quickly and looks back at the floor. This is not part of the script.

Jemma Simmons, self-proclaimed queen of the script, went off-script.

“What—?” he starts to choke out, but she turns again, kisses him again.

It’s not the worst thing in the world. The push and pull of their lips spins a delicate pattern, circular and giving. They are the most beautiful struggle for air this universe has ever seen. He is tender and disbelieving. He is himself. If Jemma had to imagine how Fitz kissed, she would’ve guessed this much.

She wraps her arms around his neck and pulls closer, twisting her torso. He’s not touching her. He’s not. She whines into his mouth and then his hand is on her cheek, still unsure, and she honestly can’t believe it. She honestly can’t believe that he thinks she might be lying even though she’s begging at his feet. And she can’t believe that despite all of that, Fitz still knows what she wants.

She pushes harder. _Match me_. She tugs at his lip with her teeth, rakes a hand through his hair, whines again. _Match me_.

He pulls away.

He looks funny. She’d laugh if it was a moment that could hold laughter. His lips are all red and he’s blushing hard and his hair’s all ruffled up. And his collar’s mussed. And his eyes are closed.

“This isn’t a one-off.” It’s a question, minus the form. He is unsure of everything now. She needs to make him sure.

“A one-off?” She raises an eyebrow, despite herself.

He opens his eyes. “I just need to hear you say it.”

 

 

 

 

_“I asked you. You said you weren’t HYDRA.”_

_“I’m not HYDRA.”_

_“But you still went and—”_

_“I know.”_

 

 

 

 

“This is permanent.” She looks him in the eye; she can’t look anywhere else. “This is permanent. Is that okay?” Because she wants to be sure.

He’s giving her that look again. It changes his entire face. He’s nodding. He’s trying to say _yeah_ but it gets caught in his throat, so all she gets is a whispery little half-note before he dives back into her.

 Finally. _Finally_.

They’re on the same page again.

His shirt needs to go. She undoes the buttons quickly as he kisses down her neck, little pressed flowers trailing down her skin, photosynthetic turned static, undying. He lingers there, forehead pressed to the crook of her neck. Breathing her in. She pushes his shirt over his shoulders. He tries to return the favor but his fingers are stuttering and confused; they haven’t caught up to his brain yet. So she takes them and presses them to her face. _Love me here_. He picks his head up and kisses her deeply between his two hands as she undoes her own buttons.

Somehow he has no trouble unhooking her bra (something she might ask about when she has a clearer mind) and suddenly his temple is pressed to her collar, lips to the tender flesh between her breasts. This is an unhinged locomotive, coal-fire driven and whipping around the curves of the track. She holds him tightly and he vibrates beneath her arms, too insistent to truly be muffled. They wrestle and writhe out of the rest of their covers. Fitz pulls her down on top of him too quickly and clips his head on the bunk wall, pulling a noise of surprise out of her before she rubs the tender bump with the fingertips.

What a truly precious thing it is to see him so eager and yet holding himself back. He’s trying so hard not to spook her, even still. It’s going to take a long time to convince him of anything, stubborn and self-effacing as he is. But she doesn’t feel hopeless. She feels energized. She is Jemma Simmons and she can do anything.

She kisses him. Then she kisses him again. His arm is outflung, his hand his scrambling for something, so she tilts her head and opens her eyes. Condom. But the gesture is a question.

Jemma takes it from his hands. She can do anything, so she does this. Rolls it over the length of him, watches his eyes wick impossibly. Kisses him some more. Lowers herself, meets him in the middle with a groan.

If this is how it’s going to be, so it will be. It feels unending. Constancy. And then he rolls her over, and more constancy. The flame is going right through her, making easy work of her flesh and blood and muscle and bone. By the end she will be half a brain and a pile of ash. Sticky with sweat dripping into the sheets, and unfinished thoughts. And him.

And still him.

 

 

 

 

_“I’m sorry you went through everything alone,” Fitz says. Jemma opens her mouth to brush it off, but it’s stuck to her like sap and he knows it. “You left me here, but you left me with all of our friends. And you had to go off by yourself. I can’t imagine what that was like.”_

_She stares, growing warm. She can feel tears prickling again. The hot air is rising; she doesn’t want it to escape but it will, one way or another, so she lets it out._

_“I, um.” This is hard. She’s not used to admitting this kind of thing. “I don’t think I’ve really dealt with anything that happened,” she whispers._

_He’s unsure, grown still in anxiety. His hand hovers around her shoulder but never lands._

_“I think May is worried about me. Bobbi told her something, and they both keep hovering—” She breaks off. She has nowhere to go. She can feel the pressure from years and years away, travelling forward to haunt her into self-combusting._

_“We’ll fix it.”_

_She wants to close her eyes._

_“I don’t know how, Fitz.”_

_But he’s sure. “We’ll fix it.”_

 

Fitz has a lock of her hair wound around his finger, not tight, just soft. Feeling. Every single one of his atoms wants to hug her; and she knows because she can feel them singing to her, asking her to stick around.

“You started it,” he murmurs.

“I always start it.”

“I started it last time,” he counters.

“And _that_ worked out so well.”

“Rude.”

“’S true.”

“We’re going to be alright, you and me.”

She can’t see his face but she can hear the rumbling of his chest, like thunder bringing warm rain to summer heat. Jemma breathes out.

“Of course we are.”

She believes it.

  


End file.
